Deadly Medicine

Although older people have long been accustomed to the fact that no substantial testing on older people is done prior to the FDA’s approval of a new drug, the offshoring of all pre-approval drug testing opens the door to a nightmare of ethical, safety and quality issues.

Prescription drugs kill some 200,000 Americans every year. Will that number go up, now that most clinical trials are conducted overseas—on sick Russians, homeless Poles, and slum-dwelling Chinese—in places where regulation is virtually nonexistent, the F.D.A. doesn’t reach, and “mistakes” can end up in pauper’s graves? The authors investigate the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry, and the U.S. Government’s failure to rein in a lethal profit machine.

Somehow, we are going to have to recover the ancient ideal of medicine and the healing arts as vital servants of a just and equitable society.

Once upon a time, the drugs Americans took to treat chronic diseases, clear up infections, improve their state of mind, and enhance their sexual vitality were tested primarily either in the United States (the vast majority of cases) or in Europe. No longer. As recently as 1990, according to the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, a mere 271 trials were being conducted in foreign countries of drugs intended for American use. By 2008, the number had risen to 6,485—an increase of more than 2,000 percent. A database being compiled by the National Institutes of Health has identified 58,788 such trials in 173 countries outside the United States since 2000. In 2008 alone, according to the inspector general’s report, 80 percent of the applications submitted to the F.D.A. for new drugs contained data from foreign clinical trials. Increasingly, companies are doing 100 percent of their testing offshore. The inspector general found that the 20 largest U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies now conducted “one-third of their clinical trials exclusively at foreign sites.” All of this is taking place when more drugs than ever—some 2,900 different drugs for some 4,600 different conditions—are undergoing clinical testing and vying to come to market.

The big drug companies are becoming increasingly desperate because the “pipeline” of new blockbuster drugs has run dry. What they fail to understand (perhaps it is more accurate to say) what their business model will not permit them to understand is that the era of the medical miracle molecule is behind us.

The 21st century will relocate medical progress away from the lab and toward the health care system itself. The critical issue that will define REAL CARE will be: “How can we better utilize the knowledge, drugs and procedures we already have in order to ensure better health outcomes for people of all ages?”

So how bad will the descent of medicine and healing into a purely profit driven enterprise shorn entirely of ethics, morality and compassion be? The authors of the Vanity Fair expose close their piece the a look at “rescue countries.”

Read it and weep.

One big factor in the shift of clinical trials to foreign countries is a loophole in F.D.A. regulations: if studies in the United States suggest that a drug has no benefit, trials from abroad can often be used in their stead to secure F.D.A. approval. There’s even a term for countries that have shown themselves to be especially amenable when drug companies need positive data fast: they’re called “rescue countries.” Rescue countries came to the aid of Ketek, the first of a new generation of widely heralded antibiotics to treat respiratory-tract infections. Ketek was developed in the 1990s by Aventis Pharmaceuticals, now Sanofi-Aventis. In 2004—on April Fools’ Day, as it happens—the F.D.A. certified Ketek as safe and effective. The F.D.A.’s decision was based heavily on the results of studies in Hungary, Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey.

The approval came less than one month after a researcher in the United States was sentenced to 57 months in prison for falsifying her own Ketek data. Dr. Anne Kirkman-Campbell, of Gadsden, Alabama, seemingly never met a person she couldn’t sign up to participate in a drug trial. She enrolled more than 400 volunteers, about 1 percent of the town’s adult population, including her entire office staff. In return, she collected $400 a head from Sanofi-Aventis. It later came to light that the data from at least 91 percent of her patients was falsified. (Kirkman-Campbell was not the only troublesome Aventis researcher. Another physician, in charge of the third-largest Ketek trial site, was addicted to cocaine. The same month his data was submitted to the F.D.A. he was arrested while holding his wife hostage at gunpoint.) Nonetheless, on the basis of overseas trials, Ketek won approval.

Related Posts

About Dr. Bill Thomas

Bill is a visionary leader in the online Changing Aging movement and a world-renowned authority on geriatric medicine and eldercare. Bill is founder of two movements to reshape long-term care globally – The Eden Alternative and Green House Project. He is currently traveling the country influencing culture change with the ChangingAging Tour.

ChangingAging Newsletter

Join 30,636 subscribers and stay updated on all things ChangingAging

Your E-Mail Address ...

No charge. No Spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

What if everything you’ve been told about aging is wrong?

Join Dr. Bill Thomas and friends for ChangingAging Tour - Coming to a city near you!

This is just one more proof of why private industry is NOT the solution to our health care problems, despite what some politicans maintain. Of course, Congress’s response will probably take one of two forms: (1) sticking their heads in the sand to make the problem go away (also known as “Let’s not do anything that could endanger our politican fund-raising); or (2) passing a new law filled with loopholes to resolve the issue.

There is a big problem, however, with the latter “solution,” i.e., the pharmaceutical industry is a lot smarter than Congress. The result, Congress nearly always acts in a reactive mode, putting out the fire after the house has already burned to the ground. In the meantime, while Congress diddles with their fix, Big Pharma is already implementing their next work-around.

If this may seem overly cynical, I believe in living with my eyes wide open. For most issues, I wholeheartedly agree that private industry CAN be the solution, if it has appropriate governmental oversight. However, the two biggest abusers of America’s trust are the pharmaceutic and financial industries. If one could assign human traits to them, the best description of their behavior would psychopathic narcissisism. In other words, “It’s all about me; screw the American consumer!”